Into a quieter time of year, the potential is there, where you will not have to do what you think you need to do, where you can simply be, and that is enough.

To this time of year I add and am inspired by the words of author Ursula K. Le Guin, speaking of a feminine way of being, spoken as part of a commencement address she gave over thirty years ago.

See how it shines now:

(Full speech here: A Left-Handed Commencement Address)

"In our society, women have lived, and have been despised for living, the whole side of life that includes and takes responsibility for helplessness, weakness, and illness, for the irrational and the irreparable, for all that is obscure, passive, uncontrolled, animal, unclean — the valley of the shadow, the deep, the depths of life. All that the Warrior denies and refuses is left to us and the men who share it with us and therefore, like us, can’t play doctor, only nurse, can’t be warriors, only civilians, can’t be chiefs, only indians. Well so that is our country. The night side of our country. If there is a day side to it, high sierras, prairies of bright grass, we only know pioneers’ tales about it, we haven’t got there yet. We’re never going to get there by imitating Machoman. We are only going to get there by going our own way, by living there, by living through the night in our own country.

So what I hope for you is that you live there not as prisoners, ashamed of being women, consenting captives of a psychopathic social system, but as natives. That you will be at home there, keep house there, be your own mistress, with a room of your own. That you will do your work there, whatever you’re good at, art or science or tech or running a company or sweeping under the beds, and when they tell you that it’s second-class work because a woman is doing it, I hope you tell them to go to hell and while they’re going, to give you equal pay for equal time. I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls."

I am a woman, more than I am a man, in how I feel in gender. I feel called to help women on their journeys in life, being male-bodied, relating more to women. I feel the exquisite beauty and divinity of each woman's truth as I come to talk to and know each one.

I have always been on a spiritual journey, knowingly, more than most, and I have found that we all will break through gender definitions, that they don't matter, and the form coming closest to this on departure from gender is the female form of spirit.

In a loving way, this human way, this is the path.

I do not think the self-sacrificing male energies are the loving way to travel a spiritual path.

The sacred feminine means then, all the ways I have been touched by the spirit of my womanhood throughout my life, and perhaps even girlhood in my more playful moments.

I have gotten the greatest wisdom and inspiration and advice from fellow women, and that spirit of woman within me.

It may seem strange to me at times, and disconcerting, this disconnect from how my body is and what others might expect, but I cannot deny that I have a true female spirit, that I do not need to do anything, but just be me, and she comes out.

Thank God/dess! She comes out.